A balcony, a moving camera, the stuck needle of a battered Victrola playing the same phrase of an old song ("Chagrin d' Amour"), over and over again. In the room, a fleshy man, the sweating assassin Peter Banat (Jack Moss) prepares to go out -- combing his hair, putting on thick glasses, looking at his instructions, checking his revolver, donning a top coat, and a fedora hat. It is the simple but phenomenal pre-credit sequence (one of the first in sound movies) which introduces Norman Foster/Orson Welles' JOURNEY INTO FEAR (1943). Much of rest of the film may seem chopped up (and is), illogical (indeed it is, for reasons known mainly to RKO); and not nearly so satisfying as its source, Eric Ambler's famous spy novel, Journey into Fear; nor so accomplished as an adaptation of Ambler's earlier A Coffin for Dimitrios [THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS, Negulesco, 1944].

Still, aided by veteran cinematographer Karl Struss and unheralded veteran soundtrack composer Roy Webb, JOURNEY INTO FEAR has brilliant camera work, atmospheric lighting, impressive manque characters; characteristic innovations or applications we now identify with Orson Welles, and incidentally, with the best of Film Noir.

So . . . nearly as most viewers can distinguish, Howard Graham (Joseph Cotten), an American engineer, ex-U.S. Navy munitions expert, is traveling in the Middle East on business, just after the beginning of World War II. He is what would today would be called "a contractor," a target for assassination or kidnapping, and he would now be considered a good deal more naive than even he appears in the film.

As the arms dealer, S. Kopeikin (Everett Sloane) says to Graham:

"You're a ballistic expert, and you've never fired a gun?"

To which Graham replies: "Well, I just never did."

[The scenario might remind us of the nerdy Canadian munitions designer, Gerald Bull, supposedly hired by Saddam Hussein to dream up the Rube Goldberg Mother of all Weapons of Mass Destruction: a cannon with an immensely long barrel, rather like the spaceship launcher in H.G. Wells' THINGS TO COME (Menzies, 1936). Bull was found dead in Belgium, under mysterious circumstances (as they say), in 1990, just before the First Gulf War. To bring the story really up to date, look on CNN, or the front page of your local paper, at the engineers who die almost weekly in Afghanistan and Iraq now.]

Why exactly Graham is stalked by Nazi agents; why he is kept separated from his wife, Stephanie (Ruth Warwick); why he is put in protective custody by Colonel Haki (Orson Welles), Chief of the Turkish Secret Police; why he is smuggled aboard the Motonavia Sistri Levende for Batum on the Black Sea (railhead for the Baku oil fields); and why he is vamped by the seductive Leopard Woman dancer, Josette Martel (Dolores Del Rio), will be revealed with various degrees of clarity in the course of the picture.

It all has to do with an incident at the nightclub where the tricky S. Kopeikin (Everett Sloane) took Graham to see a magic act. Oo Lang Sang (Han Conried) the Magician is shot (shades of Hitchcock's THE 39 STEPS). Josette the Leopard Woman and her husband-manager, Gogo Martel (Jack Durant), are frightened for their lives. Soon Kopeikin has disappeared, Colonel Haki is protecting Stephanie (shades of Welles' TOUCH OF EVIL), and the rest of the cast are aboard the Sistri Levende.

On this slow boat to Batum, we are introduced to the bickering Mr. and Mrs. Mathews (Agnes Moorehead and Frank Readick), Mr. Kuveti (Edgar Barrier) the tobacco merchant, a stern Professor Haller (Eustace Wyatt) and his wife (Shifra Haran). Not to mention the last passenger to embark, the Assassin Banat. How they interact on the voyage with the help or hindrance of the Captain (Richard Bennett), the purser (Stefan Schnabel) and the chief steward (Herb Drake) pulls the plot together for a rain-blurred climax on a hotel window ledge.

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JOURNEY INTO FEAR was to have been the final picture Orson Welles owed RKO on his fabled contract. [The first being CITIZEN KANE (1941), the second THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (1942), and IT'S ALL TRUE (never completed), released as a documentary in 1993.] But in re-negotiating that contract, he lost considerable control and took on more obligations.

Perhaps, as a result, Welles played Colonel Haki, a minor character in screen time, but significant to the resolution of JOURNEY INTO FEAR, and may be seen . . . well . . . not all that good. He was directing THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS by day, and helping Norman Foster direct JOURNEY INTO FEAR at night. He and Joseph Cotten [with the help of Richard Collins (RIOT ON CELL BLOCK 11 -- 1954), and old pro Ben Hecht] had adapted the original 1940 novel by Eric Ambler to make what looks now to be a bit of a lark. Welles is said to have shot most of his scenes all at once so he could catch a Pan American Clipper for Rio to begin the Brazilian segment of the portmanteau IT'S ALL TRUE, his disastrous contribution to America's war effort.

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Joseph Cotten represents an unwitting player in a much larger game, as has been remarked, similar to his Holly Martins in THE THIRD MAN (Lean, 1949); also the kind of figure who often turns up in later Hitchcock pictures. Most of Ruth Warwick's part is said to have been cut out, and Dolores del Rio is more decorative than motivating, but the rest of the cast leave intriguing impressions, and we would like to know more about their characters.

Only in JOURNEY INTO FEAR at the beginning and at the end, Welles' Colonel Haki of the Turkish Secret Police is very florid, very theatrical and, and I think, is meant to be so. [Check out a more restrained Colonel Haki (Kurt Katch) of Jean Negulesco's THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS, mentioned above.] In an astrakhan hat, great coat, mustache, and aquiline nose, Welles speaks in a heavy Turko-Russian accent, which sometimes lapses into an Irish brogue. Perhaps, he crafted a back story for Haki, that the man had been sent to Trinity College, which is the kind of Wellsian idea that might just be correct, but if so any reference to Haki's education was cut from the finished film.

Surely, Welles was drawn to the subject matter of JOURNEY INTO FEAR, among other reasons, because he was always interested how the strings of modern history were pulled by larger than life, behind the scenes figures of power (in America: Jim Fisk, Leland Stanford, Colis Huntington, Jay Gould, James J. Hill, William Randolph Hearst and Howard Hughes). These men were often almost Shakespearean in their lives, and on the World scene of Welles' time, none was larger or more enigmatic than Sir Basil Zaharoff, whom he had played on Radio's "March of Time." Zaharoff was credited with creating nations (like Iraq and Syria), building armies, starting wars, for the expansion of empires. Welles copied in CITIZEN KANE a hidden camera shot of the dying Zaharoff (in 1936) being pushed by wheel chair, in the Gare du Nord of Paris. And though he denied it, but as Welles believed, Ambler used Zaharoff for the character of Dimitrios, who is probably "paying for the bullet " to murder Graham in JOURNEY INTO FEAR. But Welles left the project in the hands of Norman Foster, Jack Moss, and Jo Cotten. But, then, RKO --

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And here, we see those "but's" -- there always seem to be those "but's," in looking at Welles' pictures, after CITIZEN KANE. Evidently, according to what Welles told Peter Bogdanovich in "This Is Orson Welles," he intended the picture to have a richer mis-en-scene, with the characters much more interrelated with the origins of the Second World War than what we have in this extant 68 minute sketch. All depth of character and complexity of meaning have been removed, leaving only the bizarre swiftness of the action and the sinister murk of the mood. Welles was obliged to do this cutting himself, and to re-shoot some scenes for continuity purposes. Welles said to Bodanovich (as we might have guessed) that the plot of JOURNEY INTO FEAR was for him mainly an excuse to explore the political motives and social reasoning of the various characters, mid-level operatives in The Great Game, at the outset of the Second World War.

Once again, special pleading is necessary to justify the reputation given the film in certain circles.

Yet, as late as 1975, when JOURNEY INTO FEAR was re-made by Daniel Mann (COME BACK LITTLE SHEBA, 1952; OUR MAN FLINT, 1966) with a top o' the line cast [Sam Waterston (in the Cotten part), Joseph Wiseman (as Colonel Haki), Yvette Mimieux, Zero Mostel, Shelly Winters, Stanley Holloway, Donald Pleasance, Vincent Price, Jackie Cooper, etc), most critics advised audiences to find a revival of Welles' edition.

As for what the film might have been, it is another case of seeing things with the mind's eye, and hoping that someone is looking in a studio vault for a canister of withering out-takes, which improbably turned up in the case of IT'S ALL TRUE. [I notice on the IMDb that an Australian fan claims to have seen Director Norman Foster's personal copy of JOURNEY INTO FEAR on Melbourne TV, presumably longer and closer to the 1942 film Welles planned than the one RKO released over a year later. The viewer says that he made a tape of it, and if true, like the legendary work print of THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS sent to Welles in Brazil, supposedly languishing today in a Rio film vault, it becomes one more of the grails which acolytes of the troubled film genius seek.]

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For the Welles fans, the film we have does contain a number of hidden pleasures:

For instance, many of the actors who appeared in CITIZEN KANE, or would turn up in THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, are here: Cotten, Moorehead, Sloane, Warwick, Richard Bennett. Other Mercury Players who had been cooling their heels in Hollywood for two years, such as Frank Readick (who created the laugh of "The Shadow" on Radio), Hans Conried (who went on to star in THE 5000 FINGERS OF DR. T, Rowland, 1953) and Edgar Barrier (Banquo in Welles' 1948 MACBETH), make first or early appearances in JOURNEY INTO FEAR.

Not only that, but there are a number of inside jokes of a kind Welles loved. One of the treasures is the performance of Welles' accountant Jack Moss in the role of Peter Banat, the Assassin. Moss, a former secretary to Gary Cooper, had taken over the Mercury Theater's business affairs after Welles had a falling out with his longtime partner, John Houseman (a crippling event). It pleased the flamboyant director/writer/actor/man-about-town to cast as a villain the man designated to ride herd on his mercurial ways. Little did Welles know that, in the eyes of later *critics, Moss lacked competence. When Welles was "drafted" to go to Brazil on his Nelson Rockefeller State Department assignment, Moss neglected the contract re-negotiation, sold Welles out, and botched the post production of both JOURNEY INTO FEAR and THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS.

If Welles lacked business acumen, he was as good at picking women as he was acting talent. In JOURNEY INTO FEAR, he had his lady fiancee of the time, Dolores del Rio, dressed in animal skins, and being tamed by a magician (Conried) and a gambler (Durant). What casting there! Might it be an unintentional (?) irony that Welles, having second thoughts about marrying the intensely beautiful Miss del Rio, should make an escape from his commitment by flying to Rio de Janeiro (coincidentally, the setting of del Rio's most memorable musical, FLYING DOWN TO RIO [1933], with Fred Astaire, where she danced on the wings of a Pan Am plane)??

The casting of Jack Durant, an old vaudevillian, is easily explained by Welles' love for such theater people, but Herb Drake (a New York critic and trusted friend) as the steward is more than just a Wellsian whim. Drake was another watchdog of Welles' affairs. This role is his only credit, as it is for the other steward, Robert Meltzer, of whom I know nothing, but who died on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Assistant and secretary to Welles, Shifra Haran, however, after playing the wife of the Nazi spymaster, lived a rewarding, successful life, contributing to biographers insightful glimpses of her beloved boss.

[And these castings remind us that Welles' radio assistant director and factotum, Paul Stewart, began his long character actor movie career as the villainous "Raymond the Butler" in CITIZEN KANE.]

As for Norman Foster, the credited director of JOURNEY INTO FEAR, he began as a song and dance man, who married Actress Sally Blaine (sister of better known Loretta Young, star of Welles' THE STRANGER). Having considerable directorial experience in B-Movies (CHARLIE CHAN AT TREASURE ISLAND, 1939, etc), he was hired by Welles to direct the Mexican segment of IT'S ALL TRUE ("And Now, Benito), and to assist him on JOURNEY INTO FEAR. Like so many, he had strong loyalties to Welles, and after Foster's death in 1976, his son wrote that his father a number of times dropped his own projects to work with Welles.

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When, Congressional Investigating Committees begin to scratch the surface of the rotten connections between the Haliburton, Carlyle, Bechtel corporations, etc., with present and past Administrations -- the oil rights, the "wars" begun to provide corporate contracts, the billions siphoned off, the equipment which didn't work, the armored Humvees which weren't, the Stryker Attack Vehicles that rolled over like our beloved SUV's, the 20-thousand unreported American casualties, the needless present "war" which continues to cost us dozens of troopers a month -- it might be useful, even for Americans who have been taught that "History is bunk," to go back to the similar "little wars" of Sir Basil Zaharoff, before the big World War's, and sadly connect them to the present day of Hamid Karzai, Saddam Hussein, Ahmed Chalabi, Iyad Allawi and the question of "who pays for the bullets."

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For a fine article on Jack Moss and an introduction to an equally fine website, look at Jeff Wilson's interesting essay:

http://www.wellesnet.com/OWA_index.htm

In addition to Stephen Murray's excellent Epinion on JOURNEY INTO FEAR,

http://www.epinions.com/content_159400889988

. . . you might look at a review of the other Ambler film featuring Colonel Haki, THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS:

http://www.epinions.com/content_77175557764

Or reviews of Welles' films mentioned above:

CITIZEN KANE --

http://www.epinions.com/mvie-review-4874-81FD18C-38741497-bd4

THE STRANGER --

http://www.epinions.com/content_140772085380

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UPDATE: FEBRUARY 21, 2006 -- Several versions of an alternate print of JOURNEY INTO FEAR have turned up overseas. Though none appear to be anything like the intended original, expect to find one or more of these already on DVD or coming soon.

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I invite you to visit the BLOG which I now maintain on my Epinions Profile Page, where I occasionally discuss matters of the day:

http://www.epinions.com/user-macresarf1/show_~View_Profile#long_bio



Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older